I’m not sure that ‘just opening the app’ counts as discovering…
It’s significantly harder on fax
X itself is the Russian disinformation campaign at this point
Saudi, but when the point is to sow discord in the west, it can be hard to tell.
How can anyone take that platform seriously?
Because in the course of little over a year, it went from a source of fairly reliable “first on scene” information to a disinformation hellsite. Aside from the bad actors, of which there are many, some people are simply disconnected and haven’t heard how unreliable it’s gotten.
… Kinda like any news dissemination outlet.
We’ve vastly overestimated the savviness of the average social media user. They can barely remember how to login via the web app. They only know how to work this smoldering poo bag of fascism, they’re completely unable to figure out Mastodon. No one is on Threads, if a miracle happens they might crawl over to bluesky to relive their glories and strut around again, but that’s a longshot.
I call it The Microsoftenshittification Poo Hole®
Search your feelings. You know this to be true.
Wwwhhhhhaaaatttttttt?!?!
shocked am I!!!
Twitter reminds me of the worst parts of the old “wild west” internet now. There’s still some good content, but it’s hidden among scams, skeezy porn ads, and some of the worst opinions you’ve ever read.
I feel pretty immune to that kind of stuff, but it’s a huge culture shock after browsing moderated social media.
Excuse me, but the old “wild west” internet was never this geopolitically evil.
That’s a really good point. There were individual trolls and general cruel maladjusted scum, but they hadn’t yet been courted or manipulated by political orgs and fed collective marching orders to sow discord.
True. And when I think, “old wild west internet,” we’re talking Usenet and hosts.txt and ASCII porn. It was a utopia compared to the shitscape it turned into (described above)
Ah, the glory days of Usenet. How we miss you.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Germany has uncovered a significant pro-Russia disinformation campaign using thousands of fake accounts on X to try to stir anger at Berlin’s support for Ukraine, a media report has said.
The revelations, first reported in Der Spiegel, come amid growing concern about the impact increasingly sophisticated disinformation campaigns could have on elections.
Experts commissioned by the German foreign ministry used specialised software to monitor posts on the online platform X, formerly known as Twitter, between 20 December and 20 January, Der Spiegel wrote.
A common theme was the accusation that Olaf Scholz’s government was neglecting Germans in favour of helping Ukraine in its war against Russia, according to Spiegel, which said it had seen excerpts of the analysis.
The accounts also often linked to fake news stories on websites designed to resemble those of genuine media outlets, Spiegel said, leading analysts to connect it to the Russia-linked “doppelganger” campaign already known to authorities.
Three regional elections are taking place this year in eastern Germany, where the far-right AfD party is riding high in the polls.
The original article contains 287 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 39%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Annoyed that there isn’t even one quoted example of the disinformation tweets
I’m not. Don’t give them any advantage ever. That includes never publishing their propaganda word-for-word.
Nein? Doch! Oh!
ORLY?
